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Old 03-22-2011, 01:54 PM   #306
Lemurion
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools View Post
Er , maybe you didnt read the response to your post showing that music industry revenues have collapsed in the last decade. No one that I know thinks that the musuic industry is in good health. Your graph proves that ITunes is doing well. It does not prove that musicians and music companies can make a good living in an age of non DRM music. Quite the contrary, if anything.
Yes, music industry revenues have collapsed in the last decade, but that doesn't mean that DRM-free music is the culprit. If you want to say the shift to digital had a hand in it, that's true; but I don't know that it's simply because digital is digital.

A big part of the revenue drop has to be attributed to the end of a long period of artificially inflated revenue. Back in the fifties and early sixties, the primary method of music consumption was based on the song. Most people bought music in the form of singles, buying two songs to get the one song they wanted. With the rise of the album, people started buying ten or twelve songs to get the two or three songs they wanted, and revenues rose because albums were much more expensive with singles.

This was followed by a series of format shifts from vinyl to cassette to CD which had people re-buying their collections two and even three times, which also inflated revenue.

Now, people are back to buying singles, and revenue has dropped because they aren't paying for the songs they don't want. They've also stopped re-buying the same music again and again because they can rip their existing CDs to get digital copies as good as any store provides - and quite frankly they're fed up of buying the same song AGAIN.

Anyone who tries to explain falling music industry revenues without considering these factors is missing the point. That's also ignoring the fact that when the RIAA started suing people they turned a large number of their former customers into enemies - and that had an effect on revenue as well.

The only numbers we do have show that no major digital music store has seen a drop in revenue after shifting from DRMed to DRM-free music.

The end result: Yes, music industry revenue has dropped; no, there is zero evidence to show that this drop in revenue is in any way due to the absence of DRM. Besides, most of the music shared on the pirate networks came from CD rips, so DRM was never a factor.
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